The Ruling Classes
It’s a strange uncomfortable feeling that the ruling classes have reappeared, having been driven underground all these years. Who are they? Traditionally, the Marxist definition of the ruling classes is well known, as being those who control the means of production. However in Britain, they are a very different group who are based on a narrow class of well born and privately educated people, who have links into the older larger landowning families. They appear to display a traditional contempt for the majority of people, while claiming affinity and concern for them.
These people are – and are proud to acknowledge – the direct descendents of the Normans
Think of the Norman conquest and what picture do you have? A quiet invasion, a brief war, a recasting of ownership of land and a long period of stability?
In practice it was the grimmest picture of ethnic cleansing and destruction of a proud nation by a gang of ruthless and greedy descendents of the very Vikings that considered Britain theirs to plunder, that Britain has ever or hopefully will ever experience. Of the thousands of land and house owners, magistrates, judges, civil servants, mentioned in the rolls, few remained, rounded up and murdered. The rest, driven from their homes, and forced into mass starvation, particularly in the North of England where the death toll is believed to be over 100,000, with substantial social, cultural, and economic damage. Because of their scorched earth policy much of the land was laid waste and salted to render it impossible to grow crops, and in places depopulated, a fact that the Domesday Book readily attests. In my home town of Colchester the entire town was leveled to the point where not one stick or stone remained, apart from one Saxon church tower, presumably left as a look out point. The remaining population were driven to the fields to the west where they were forbidden on fear of tongue slitting or worse to grow food or hunt anything bigger than the rabbit until the town was deemed sufficiently pacified to use the slaves for their purpose – to feed and clothe the Norman Lord. Their imperative were two: work on the land and be grateful for the scraps of your own toil that you are allowed to keep: and to breed to ensure a steady supply of landworkers. To ensure the quality of the brood, the Lords had, naturally, an absolute right of deflowering and using any woman they chose. The droit du seigneur.
<< The King stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies. He cut down many people and destroyed homes and land. Nowhere else had he shown such cruelty. To his shame, William made no effort to control his fury, punishing the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food be burned to ashes. More than 100,000 people perished of hunger.
I have often praised William in this book, but I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.>> Orderic Vitalis, 11th century
God of course as we know did nothing of the kind.
Undoubtedly, people can rise through merit: but generally only because they are measured by their acquired wealth, or use their wealth to ingratiate themselves from the old families, who duly look down their noses, while accepting their money and privately decrying them as Nouveau Riche (which is of course unspeakably vulgar). And of course they are graciously permitted to hand their money over in the form of semi worthless B shares which hold five times fewer voting rights than A shares in privatized public utilities, and to put it into banks owned by the institutions, which can default with no responibility to pay you back, or decide to change to very low interest rates while handing out massive bonuses. And they have no access to the kind of tax avoidance systems that characterise the larger institutions.
This was taken to extremes at the end of the nineteenth century up until the second world war, when the aristocratic families were on their uppers, and down to their last few servants and wondering how to pay for the running of the house, they solved the problem in their thousands by marrying rich American heiresses: they were special matchmaking directories, with those from Burkes peerage on one page and the heiresses on the other, and there were brokers who introduced them., Winston Churchill was of course the son of just such an heiress.
The Knickerbockers were one such rich American family who married into the Astors, who in turn produced Samantha Sheffield, now better known as Samantha Cameron. David Cameron was educated at Eton where like Boris Johnson and George Osborne, he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, a gang of old family thugs and louts who caused untold physical damage and blithely paid they way out of trouble, which was fondly ignored by the authorities as exuberance and high spirits. Nick Clegg , another scion of old family was educated at Caldicott and Westminster, mybe not Eton, but almost as good. Neither he nor Cameron would have any conception of the way of life of the non-Normans.
Are we therefore surprised when they wish to hark back to the good old days of the Normans? Does not the whole thrust of their legislation tend to this?
Look at some of the laws they propose ( many of which will never be scrutinized by the second chamber because of the Money Bill Regulations, see next blog): Return of foxhunting, removal of all animal protection laws, including domestic, farm and zoo animals, badgers and stags, Removal of rights to possession of Council and social housing, dismantling of controls in education: the list is endless. More later.
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